Bitcoin Cash’s Decentralized Social Networks

Benefits of Bitcoin Cash Blockchain Social Media Platforms

While Bitcoin Cash is primarily known as a peer-to-peer (P2P) payments network, it also has a growing token economy enabled by the underlying Simple Ledger Protocol (SLP), including a burgeoning decentralized social media sector. There are numerous ways to acquire bitcoin cash (BCH). You can buy it on an exchange, mine it, and accept it as payment, just like most other cryptocurrencies. Additionally, you can earn it via tips, patronage, and sponsorships on BCH-enabled blockchain social media platforms.

The 2017 Bitcoin fork that resulted in the bifurcation of bitcoin (BTC) and bitcoin cash saw the Bitcoin Cash network emerge with a number of key advantages. For example: Bitcoin Cash’s larger blocks result in lower transaction fees than Bitcoin’s. In September 2021, the median transaction fees for BCH, bitcoin, and ether (ETH) were $0.001, $0.69, and $7.22 USD, respectively. High transaction fees may reward miners with increased profits, but they may also diminish utility for users looking to send small amounts of funds on-chain quickly and affordably.

Low network fees are of primary importance in Bitcoin Cash’s emergence as a decentralized social media platform. From its inception in August 2018 to September 2021, BCH has maintained average and median transaction fees of $0.0089 and $0.0014, respectively. This factor has led many decentralized social platforms to migrate to Bitcoin Cash, as its network enables microtransactions and tips as small as one penny to be sent on-chain. In fact, while some BCH-based decentralized social networks solely offer BCH tipping on-chain, some networks go as far as recording posts directly on-chain. This on-chain content posting means that the content posted is immutable, censor-resistant, and viewable to anyone on the Bitcoin Cash protocol in perpetuity.

Resilient and immutable content is just one example of what Bitcoin Cash is bringing to social media. Here are some of the notable projects that are building their own blockchain-based social media platforms on Bitcoin Cash.

Read.cash: A Decentralized Social Media Blogging Platform

Released by an anonymous team in October 2019, read.cash is a content platform similar to Medium and Reddit. The homepage features a content feed, while you can navigate the site to find content based on topics ranging from crypto to gardening, gaming, creative writing, and music. Posts fall into two categories: full articles, which allow you to include videos, pictures, a sponsorship section, and short posts, which only allow text and are typically used when you want to ask a question related to a topic.

Read.cash also offers “communities,” which are discussion forums comparable to “subreddits” on the Reddit platform. Anyone on the read.cash platform can create their own community and moderate it at their own discretion. While some BCH blockchain social media sites record every interaction on the blockchain, read.cash uses a traditional web database structure for most actions, including content posting. The only thing that’s on-chain on read.cash is the tipping functionality and the user’s BCH wallet. The tips are therefore P2P and censorship-resistant.

To achieve the read.cash founders’ goals of rewarding creators, the read.cash platform features numerous monetization features. Read.cash takes a 10% cut of upvote tips and gives the remaining 90% to the content creator. There is an upvote feature at the bottom of articles that has pre-set BCH tip buttons varying from $0.01–5.00, as well as a custom tipping option. In addition to this, read.cash has an affiliate program that gets users 3% of spending, earnings, and sponsorships from anyone they get to sign up. There is also a random tipping bot that tips articles using a portion of the funds read.cash collects. A sponsorship functionality allows companies to sponsor writers in exchange for exposure. For creators looking for attention, you can use BCH holdings from your wallet to “boost” your post, which gives it more exposure to users of the decentralized social media platform.

Memo.cash: Bitcoin Cash Plus Twitter

You could think of memo.cash as a censorship-resistant version of Twitter that’s built on Bitcoin Cash and the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). It was launched initially as a browser-based iteration for desktop on April 15, 2018. Following this, apps were released for Android and iOS in January 2019 and Nov. 2020, respectively. Like Twitter, memo.cash has hashtags and a character limit, with memo.cash’s “memos” being limited to 217 characters. It also allows you to post videos, pictures, and link to other content. You also have the ability to conduct polls and “like” other content. There is a main news feed that can be refreshed and different filters that allow users to search for topics.

Memo.cash also has several features that can’t be found on centralized posting platforms such as Twitter. For one, you can tip memos you like using bitcoin cash, as memo.cash is built on the Bitcoin Cash blockchain. Each memo.cash account is linked to a BCH wallet address. You can either have this generated for you when you sign up or import a wallet of your choosing. Your BCH wallet is non-custodial, which means you control your private key and any BCH that’s held in your wallet.

Posts and content are written directly on Bitcoin Cash, which makes them visible to anyone using a BCH explorer. This helps make posts highly censorship-resistant; it’s practically impossible to take posts down (even for the creator of the memo), as they’re permanently stored on the blockchain. This is because all posts are tied to a BCH transaction and broadcast across the BCH protocol.

As nearly every action on memo.cash writes a transaction on-chain, users need to have BCH in their wallet to post content or update their profile. As BCH transaction fees average fractions of a penny, many users simply start with $0.05–0.10 USD worth of BCH and go from there. One often-mentioned benefit of these microfees is that it drastically cuts down on trolling and spam-spewing bots.

Furthermore, you don’t need many tips to make the experience completely free — or even profitable. If you end up being a popular content creator who’s receiving BCH tips, you can export the funds at any time to another wallet of your choosing.

Member.cash: Decentralized Social Network BCH Tipping

Member.cash is a decentralized social media network that’s similar to memo.cash. It allows you to comment on posts, “heart” them, and tip via BCH. It also allows you to “re-member” or repost content, which is akin to a Twitter retweet.

One notable feature of member.cash is its fairly robust filtering tools. As a user, you have the ability to mute words; you can even filter out other users or posts that feature content from other centralized and decentralized social networks. For example, you can choose to hide posts from members with no handle or no picture. You can also hide Tweets, Youtube videos, Imgur images, and content from LBRY. Another way member.cash is different is that its code is open-source, whereas memo.cash’s code isn’t.

Noise.cash: Read.cash’s Sister Blockchain Social Media Network

Created by the same mysterious team that’s behind read.cash, noise.cash is a Twitter-like microblogging platform that’s BCH-enabled and overlaps somewhat with memo.cash and member.cash. The terms of service are similar to those of read.cash (no objectionable content, no begging for tips). Noise.cash allows for short posts that include text and pictures only. There is a free BCH pool that pays you tips simply for interacting on the platform.

One interesting feature of this blockchain social media network is its BCH pool’s built-in “pay it forward” design. You can choose to keep anywhere from 0–80% of a tip, with the remainder given to you solely to tip and curate other quality content. You can simply tip the post you like by scanning the QR code attached to it. Noise.cash doesn’t have a built-in wallet but enables you to link your account to an external wallet to receive tips.

BCH Tipping on Non-Decentralized Social Networks?

In addition to Bitcoin Cash’s blockchain social media landscape, clever developers have gone beyond decentralized social networks and enabled BCH tipping on traditional websites and social networks. A WordPress tool called Cashtippr allows the creator of any WordPress website or blog to receive BCH. Cashtippr allows you to receive tips, put certain content behind a BCH paywall, or operate a subscription-based service.

Another platform called Sharetip allows you to tip content hosted on practically any URL. Here’s how it works:

1. Share the amount you wish to tip and the URL link with Sharetip.

2. Sharetip sleuths work to connect the URL with the external account of the creator.

3. If the content creator can prove they own the account that’s linked to the content, the tip is sent to them. For each tip, 2% goes to Sharetip, 2% goes to the sleuth (who connected the URL to the external account), and 1% goes to the first referrer of the content creator, who receives 1% of all their future tips.

4. If the creator doesn’t claim the tip within seven days, the tip is returned to the tipper’s crypto wallet.